Scientific Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Engineering - Automotive Engineering, language: English, abstract: Automation systems are the most general systems known in engineering, since they couple the management of matter, energy, and information in space, time, and causality. Indeed, such systems define entire production processes where materials and processed, transported, and stored. The production processes of materials require (mostly electrical) energy needed for the operating machines, such that energy has also to be transformed, transported, and stored. The machines are controlled by computers, such that information flows are also present, implying that information has also to be processed, communicated among the operating machines, and stored. In order to formalize the description of such automation processes we will define a system and a process in a deductive manner in this chapter. This definition will appear astonishing at this step, but will be clarified in the following chapters explaining what information and causality are, and how they behave in physics together with matter, energy, space, and time.